Rory O'Connor

And the result is that people are going to lose their jobs.

And for the players sitting in South Africa, scrolling through their phones and hearing the messages that the CEO flew back from South Africa to address staff on Tuesday in a fairly hastily... I think they were told on Monday there was a meeting and on Tuesday they were informed that these redundancies were happening.

That's another...

layer of pressure on the players because they know that if they don't get top eight this is just the start of it you know and and their voluntary redundancies now but we all know anyone who's been through redundancies know that if they don't get enough voluntaries then compulsories are probably on the way so it's a really tricky spot for them it's not related to the rfu's overall cost cutting initiatives that have been going on that haven't as i understand have been implemented so there could be more coming from lads down down the road as well so this is a precarious enough position for munster to be in

And the problem is if you start cutting budgets at the playing side of things, then the performance is likely to go down.

And that is alarming.

And Munster fans know where they've got holes in the squad.

They need strong overseas signings to supplement what they've got coming through.

An improving academy, it's not producing at the highest level, but it is an improving academy.

And they haven't been able to replace kind of legendary figures like for like, which is a hard thing to do, but...

I think that they're not achieving on their potential at the same time.

I think Munster should be one of the strongest teams in the URC year in, year out.

I think there's enough good players in there to be much more competitive and picking up those bonus points that you're talking about.

So there's an underperformance there, but the cost of that underperformance could be felt...

and the Challenge Cup the benefit of a Challenge Cup season is you can do a reset and you probably need a slimmer squad you can play more academy players but those quotes from Philip Quinn sounds like a reset would be ruinous but Ulster had to cut their budget by around a million pounds I think it was Hugh McGaughy talked about a couple of years ago Ulster have been through this they've gone through this pain maybe they need to slim their playing budget

Maybe there's players on contracts there who shouldn't be there and maybe they need to cut some of the older players to bring through some of the more exciting players.

There's hard conversations needed.

There is a reset.

The first team are underperforming and there's not a great budget to go out there and get Adil Ande and Snyman so you're going to have to find solutions from within and that's a massive coaching challenge for Clayton McMillan who I'm sure would like to bring in

a Tony Brown-esque kind of attack coach to kind of run his attack but might not be able to so there's there's so much going on with Munster it seems like there's always so much going on with Munster it never seems as settled or stable as you'd want it to be I don't think it's good for Irish rugby in any way if that if they start struggling if they slip to the challenge cup